


Little Cups of Gold

by Thealmostrhetoricalquestion



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fae, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bisexual Adam Parrish, Drama & Romance, Fae & Fairies, Family, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 11:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14592162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion/pseuds/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion
Summary: When Ronan Lynch was seven years old, he saw a boy disappear through the ground. When Ronan Lynch was seventeen, that same boy walked out of a forest that Ronan had dreamed to life.





	Little Cups of Gold

**Author's Note:**

> I will forever continue to write about fae and fairies and all thing folklore-ish. I promise not to change any of the characters too much, but I do want to explore a little bit about how Adam would have been with a different, but still dark childhood, one where he gets to escape. There are mentions of child abuse dotted throughout, so please don't make yourself uncomfortable by reading it if you can't, it's no more descriptive than it is in the books though.

The man that came for Adam was not a man at all. 

Henrietta was hot that day. That was the thing that would stick in Adam’s mind, years later, how the sun beat down on the dust-ridden planes that made up the trailer park where Adam lived. There was nothing but roughly-regimented lines of trailers and sickly yellow grass around. It was nothing like the lush fields Adam could see out beyond, where the rain fell sometimes. Rain never fell here, but Adam thought it could do with it. It could do with something to wash away all the unpleasantness, to give the grass a drink. Maybe flowers would even grow then. 

It was baking hot, but the man that came for Adam wore black, dense clothes all over his skin, almost like he was bandaged from head to toe. _Mummified_. Adam knew that word from the books in school - there were only a few, crammed into a cubby at the back of a tiny classroom, pages spotted with age and faded, but one of them was a ratty gold book on Egyptian Gods. Adam spent his playtimes avoiding the other kids and immersing himself in the world of Thoth and Ra and Anubis, cross-legged on the square of scratchy carpet near the cupboard, where nobody would bother him. 

“You’re not s’posed to be here, sir,” Adam said dutifully, as the stranger’s bulk cast a shadow over where he sat playing. He had three toys - a car with squeaky wheels, a small doll with blue ribbons in her stringy hair, and a toy boat - and he treasured each one, hid them under his bed at night so his father wouldn’t step on them and snap them into pieces. Like he wanted to with Adam. Adam thought his dad would like that, the sound of plastic breaking like bones under his heavy boots, and he didn’t want to do anything his dad might’ve liked. 

He cupped a careful hand around the closest one, just in case the stranger got any ideas. He had a healthy mistrust of grown-ups and strangers, although this one was just strange enough to pique his curiosity. 

“Sir. Hmm. I quite like that.” Sir tipped his head like the birds that rested in the hedgerows on the way to school, the ones that nipped at Adam’s fingers in search of seeds and fruit. Adam never had anything to give them, and he would have felt bad about that, but he barely had enough food for himself. 

“And why am I not supposed to be here? Is it charmed?”

Adam knew how to be charming, but he didn’t know how a place could be charmed. He decided to just tell the man what he was supposed to say to anyone who came by. “Everyone’s asleep inside, and they don't want what you’re selling, sir. I’m s’posed to be quiet, so I think you are too.”

Sir crouched and stared at him. His face was the only part of him visible through the mountains of black cloth, and it was a cold sort of face, pointed and narrow. His eyes were black pools that sharpened when Adam gazed back unflinchingly. And then surprise took over his expression, grabbed it by the reins, and there were hands on their way up towards the bruise that loitered near Adam’s left eye.

Adam kept still. Sir did not touch him, merely lowered his hands before they could touch his skin.

“You even look like her,” Sir murmured, and for a moment, he was not cold, but sad. And then a storm washed over Sir’s features, a storm that spoke of bad things. Adam clenched a hand around his car and considered running, but bad things hid inside the trailer too, and there was nowhere else to go. 

Sir moved closer, almost like he was floating, his knees not touching the ground as he knelt before Adam. Adam did not move. He knew how to stay still, how to make himself smaller, and he did so now, shrinking down inside of himself as he waited for the stranger to strike. They always struck, in the end. Sometimes his dad liked to lift a hand just to see if Adam flinched, but he always struck, in the end. 

“I will not harm you,” Sir said, after a moment of silence. “I vow to never lay a finger on you, Adam.”

People didn’t need fingers, Adam had learned. A broken beer bottle hurt just as much as a hand. But Sir didn’t seem like he meant to trick Adam, even if he was a stranger, and an odd one at that, a cold man in a world of heat. 

Because this _was_ Adam’s whole world that the stranger had walked into. This trailer park, his curtained-off room that smelled like mildew, the gravel path that led to school and the carpet at the back of the classroom. The hedgerows where the birds perched and the farm he sometimes saw with the big, sprawling barns and fields full of dozing cattle; those were fanciful things that didn’t quite make it into Adam’s world. Right on the edge, bursting with colour and life.

His world was narrow and small, growing smaller each day, an aching thing.

“How d'ya know my name?” Adam said, eyeing him curiously, falling upon the more pressing part of Sir’s promise. His fingers uncurled, and the car fell in the dust, wheels sticking in the heat. 

“I read it in your eyes. I read your story, Adam Parrish, in the veins on your wrist,” Sir said. 

Adam blinked. The sun was hot on his neck, sticking his t-shirt to his skin and burning his arms, which bloomed with freckles. “That’s crazy.”

“I know you. You were told you were nothing but dust and dirt,” Sir said softly, with a glance at the quiet trailer. His voice became a snarl, a tangled clump of thorns caught in Adam’s earthy hair. “You are seven years old. You were hurt at the hands of those who were bound to love you as their own. You have been dreaming of escape for years now, Adam, and I have come to give it to you.”

“That’s why you’re here?” Adam asked. 

Sir smiled grimly, and Adam sensed death in the air. A cool, substantial feeling, like the touch of warm fingers against a stone grave on a spring day. It sent shivers up his spine, and the hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle. 

“Not at first,” Sir said, with another glance at the trailer. “Now that I have seen you… yes. That is my purpose here. I am offering you a new life. There is much more to the world than dust and broken cars, Adam. The world is much bigger than this space you play in.”

Adam scrambled to his feet and backed up a few steps, until he crashed into the railing that led to the trailer door. He felt panic begin to boil within him like a pot of cheap potatoes, small and hard as bullets, bubbling on a broken stove. The stranger was in his head, messing around with the thoughts in there, pulling them out through his ears like loops of yarn pulled through a knitting needle. 

Sir stood up too and watched Adam carefully. The curtain in the trailer moved slightly, as though shifted by a breeze, but Adam knew better. There was unkindness inside, watching him, getting ready to strike, but there was something different in front of him, and he had nowhere to step to escape either outcome. The curtain moved again, and a hand appeared. 

“It must be your choice, Adam,” Sir said. “I will not take another thing from you.”

Adam didn’t truly understand, but he felt his lungs shake in surprise as he inhaled sharply. There was nobody in the world that had ever offered Adam a choice before. Not his parents. Not the other people in the trailer park. Not even his teachers, who saw the bruises and did next to nothing, who saw his empty lunchbox and did nothing, who saw the way he walked alone on the gravel path to school and did nothing. 

“It must be your choice,” Sir said again, with a glance at the door handle. It had begun to move. 

Adam took a deep breath. 

Adam squared his shoulders. 

Adam made a choice. 

“Boy,” snarled his father, staggering out of the trailer door with a crash and squinting in the midday sun. He brought with him the rank stench of alcohol and old sweat, but Adam was not there to endure it. The moment he had made his decision, Sir had read the truth of it in his eyes, swept him up in his arms, and whisked him away. 

Robert Parrish did not realise that his life was about to trip even further downhill. He did not realise that he would soon be in a jail cell, or that the sun was about to set on his marriage, or that three treasured toys sat in the shadow of the trailer, unharmed and well-loved, unlike the boy who had kept them hidden all his life. 

He grunted at the empty patch of grass, and then turned and stumbled back inside. What he did inside, whether he drank or slept or drank some more, was not known by Adam, who was flying through the dark, his eyes wide and a shrill shriek caught in his throat. 

Sir smirked at the boy and carried on. Adam held on for dear life and hoped that this world would be better than the last. They did not go right, or left, or backwards or forwards. They did not go across the path, or through the forest, or over into town. 

They went down, down, down and into faerieland. 

*

Fae grew slowly, taking their time, but Adam was only half-fae, although he did not know it. So he bloomed like the blossoms on the overreaching, sprawling trees that lined the Halls of Fait. Quick to fade, Sir said often, with a sad glint in his dark eyes. He watched as Adam grew like a human would, a mortal, watched as his bones widened and his skin stretched and his hair thickened. 

Adam didn’t mind the watching. Everyone did it down here. There were creatures big and small, some with wings and some without, with skin in shades of brown and black and white and silver. Never gold, although Adam’s skin had a goldish tint, a fact which drew many an eye. There were always eyes on him, always whispers in his ears, but he didn’t mind. He liked it, in fact. After years of being ignored and hurt, any kind of sweet attention was welcome. 

“Fae are not sweet,” Sir admonished him, when Adam expressed this during his eighth birthday party. “Fae are cruel and flighty, and they think only of themselves. You would do well not to trust us. I have been trying to teach you this for months.”

“You were kind,” Adam pointed out. He felt safe with Sir, who still hadn’t told Adam his real name. He had shed his black bandages though, revealing skin that gleamed like gold coins. The colour meant something, Adam knew.

“You were kind enough to bring me here. You stole me away.”

Sir grinned, his sharp, pointed teeth pressed together like the fine points of knives, pearly-white. 

“I did steal you away.” He seemed proud of this fact. “I did not do it entirely out of kindness, Adam.”

Adam left that alone, and Sir left him alone, sweeping out of the Halls with a wave of his burnished cloak. It was made of leaves, as far as Adam could tell, crisp autumn leaves that looked burned and alive. Sometimes Adam curled up on the bottom of the cloak, at Sir’s feet, and napped. Sometimes he swiped a leaf that had begun to peel away and kept it locked in a hawthorn box beneath his bed. He had six so far. 

Three more than the toys he had at home. 

The Halls of Fait quickly became his new home. They were great, towering structures of deep oak, far beneath the earth, or perhaps on another plane entirely. There were many nooks to explore and rooms to investigate, and Adam knew he was safe in each one. Sometimes Guards followed him around, their bug-like eyes watching his every step, but Adam wasn’t afraid of them. He knew their names and the colour of their wings and he was not afraid anymore. 

It was hard, at first, to learn the twisting, winding ways of the world that was unfamiliar to him, but soon enough he knew where to step, where not to step, and when to crouch and roll away from the flurrying creatures. That’s what Adam called them, the fae that flew above him and never stopped, not for anyone, not even for the Little Princeling. 

That was what they called him. Bird-boy, for the fine bones in his cheeks and wrists and neck, and Earthworm for the dirt-colour of his hair, and Little Princeling for the gold on his skin. 

Adam knew it had to mean something, and he was a smart boy, so he figured it out quickly. 

“I belong here, don't I?” Adam asked one night, as he bathed in the silver stream that wound through the Halls of Fait. His cloth trousers were soaked through, but they would dry as soon as he stepped out of the water - such was the magic of the world he lived in. 

Sir sat nearby, on a chair that looked like a thousand twigs sewn together. His cloak fell to the floor, swept to the side, and his gold hands carefully leafed through the piles of parchment in his lap. 

He glanced up when Adam spoke, and his mouth turned down. “You always have, Adam.”

“That’s what I mean,” Adam said, as he cupped his hands and let the water pool in the bowl left behind. It would taste like coins if he lifted it to his lips, so he didn’t. He dunked it over his head, instead. 

“What are you blathering on about now?” Sir asked, as he folded down a corner on a piece of tawny parchment, inscribed with an acorn at the top. 

“People call me Little Princeling,” Adam explained, as he ran his bitten fingers through the dirt in his hair, washing it clean. “And they call you Highness. My skin is gold, like yours, and my old dad always told me I came from dirt. Like he meant it, like that’s really where I came from.”

Sir sighed harshly. He put his papers down and beckoned Adam forward, and Adam climbed out of the low river and onto the mossy banks, shaking the drops from his hair. 

“Walk with me,” Sir said, turning towards the far end of the Hall, where the steep, tall corridors made up the South half of the Halls of Fait. There was a chorus of disappointed chirps from the corner, down where the stream flowed out of the bottom of the Halls and into the Falls that led down into the Kingdom of Fae. 

Perched on the rocks at the end sat several Lily fairies, their yellow hair flowing down to mix with the water, pink petals sprouting from their skin. Adam gave them a wave, and they sighed and waved back, saddened. They liked to braid flowers into his hair after he bathed, but Sir was quickening his pace, and Adam wanted answers.

“Children in the Upper World are carried in stomachs,” Sir said, looking remarkably shifty for someone so ancient. They stomped through the halls, sweeping up leaves and dust in their wake, and Adam hurried to keep the pace. “Fae children are born differently. They are grown from seeds of flowers and plants, and planted in the soil of Yggdrasil, which grows deep in Lower World, where we reside. When they sprout, they sprout as creatures, beings that brim with life.”

Adam blinked. They had not covered this in any class before. 

Once, he had seen a woman in the store with a swollen stomach, smiling up at her husband with a glow about her face, one hand pressed to the cotton fabric stretched over her bump. His mother had sneered, and his father had been at home, drunk and asleep, so he hadn’t seen anything at all. 

That was about the extent of what Adam knew about babies. He knew crude things, spilled from his father’s tongue, but he knew nothing of the true matters of life. 

“That doesn’t seem possible,” Adam said, frowning as he dragged his fingers along the earthen walls surrounding him. The corridor filled with light as they neared the exit, and Adam knew they were coming to the South lookout, overlooking the Falls and the Third Realm of Fait. 

“This did not seem possible for you, many moons ago,” Sir said, gesturing at the view as they stepped out onto the lookout. A thin pine railing ran around the balcony, twined with purple blossoms. The rush of howling water filled the air as they stared out at the overgrown Third Realm. The First Realm was to the North, full of more dignified fae. The Second Realm lay to the East, full of sand and sun, where it was always summer, and the Fourth Realm was home to the Ever-Changing Forests of the deep, where Autumn reined. 

The Third Realm was Adam’s home, a place of spring and growth and new life, and it spanned thousands upon thousands of miles, pale green and pink and blossoming with wonder. Adam watched the place where the waterfall pooled and waved down at the nymphs and naiads that dipped beneath the cool surface of the lagoon. 

They waved back, and Sir said, “You were not born here.”

Adam looked up, a faint frown on his face. He had been so sure that he was right, that it was the only explanation, that it was why Sir had come to steal him away, to bring him back to where he rightfully belonged. 

“You were not born here, but you were grown here.”

Sir wasn’t making any sense. 

“I grew up in a trailer park,” Adam said. He traced the shape of the trailer into the pine beneath his fingers, and a ladybug fluttered over to land on his nail. He kept quite still, entranced by the filmy wings that flapped and buzzed. 

“You grew up in a dismal trailer park, but the seed which you were born from was grown here, and then plucked from the flowers that grow in the Halls of Fait, to be precise,” Sir said, his eyes on the distant horizon. “That seed was taken from this place and brought to the Upper World by vengeful hands, and buried in the soil of the trailer park, where it would never be found.” 

Adam absorbed this. He wanted to know whose the hands were, and why they were vengeful, and why he had been taken. 

“How was I born, then? If I wasn’t planted down here?”

“Yggdrasil is everywhere,” Sir said, gesturing at a dark shape in the distance. It rose up and disappeared through the clouds, delving into the sky, and Adam suspected it delved far deeper into the earth than anyone could ever know. 

“That’s Yggdrasil?” Adam asked. 

Sir hummed, leaning further over the balcony, his sharp elbows digging into the wood. 

“You should have been born under those leaves. Instead you grew, day by day, in the dust of a world that would not love you. Yggdrasil reached out for the missing seed and leant you strength, and against all odds, you grew.”

“And they took me in, when they found me,” Adam guessed. “That must be why they hated me.”

He didn’t know if it was hate, exactly. His mother had always been reserved, a statue of a woman, and Robert had despised him, but hate was something you poured energy into, and he wasn’t sure they had that in him when it came to him. 

“Resented,” Sir corrected. “They resented you.”

He did not offer an apology. Adam would not have liked it if he had. He nodded, instead, and turned his head back towards the lagoon, which gleamed in the afternoon light. Starlight would come soon and bathe the world in silver, and Adam couldn’t wait to walk along the bridges that ringed the Halls and read about old battles and magic, and Kings and quests. 

“The people who took me when I was a… a seed,” Adam said, pulling a strange face at the thought. “Where are they now?”

“Rotting,” Sir said, with a ghastly smile. 

Adam shuddered. He was not afraid of Sir, but there was nobody on earth who could withstand that smile without a tinge of horror. 

“Do not fear,” Sir said. 

Adam straightened his spine. “I don't.” He hesitated. “You didn’t tell me everything.”

“And I won’t, not yet,” Sir said agreeably. He beckoned Adam again, gesturing at the Halls. “Come. We should eat. And after we will walk in the starlight, and I will show you the world that should have been yours since the moment you opened your eyes.”

*

Adam grew. He grew, surrounded by fae and creatures and bugs and Guards, and he was never quite the wild thing they were, but he was something in between this world and that. He grew golden and tall, slim and narrow, worldly and full of an ache that he couldn’t get rid of, an ache that he didn’t understand. 

He had books and knowledge, goblets full of whatever he desired and he ran free each morning, and he walked the bridges at night. He was still called Little Princeling, even as he grew.

It was when he was seventeen that his world changed. 

He came back to his room, his skin still damp from bathing. There were flowers in his hair, and green leaves on his shoulders, and his eyes glistened as he whistled his way through the doorway.

Sir was there. He standing over a box, a box that Adam had hidden under his bed, a box of hawthorne. It was open, the contents spilled out onto the floor. 

One hundred and thirty-three leaves in varying shades of autumn lay on the thistledown at Sir’s feet. 

“What are these?” Sir asked, in a voice softer than dewdrops. 

Adam swallowed. “Pieces of you.”

Sir looked at him sharply. He had never been angry at Adam before; they had fought, once or twice, about how far into the Lower World Adam should go, about him escaping his Guards, about the way he let the sprites chase him, their teeth bared, down the corridors. 

Adam had never seen this look before, and since he had never seen Sir angry, he assumed this must be what he looked like. 

Sir bent at the knee before Adam and raised a hand. Adam no longer flinched when people came towards him, not often, but he did hesitate. Sir was patient. He simply waited until Adam moved forward by himself, his footsteps slow and starchy. 

Sir ran a hand through Adam’s hair. The touch was cool and familiar, and Adam relaxed. This was not anger. This was something else for Adam to learn. 

The leaves on the floor gathered themselves on a breeze that stirred the room. They danced across the room and piled themselves into Sir’s hands, and in his hands, the leaves shifted and changed until they became a thin stream of molten gold, floating liquid. 

Adam watched, awed, as the liquid solidified into shapes. Delicate leaves and flowers connected by sprigs of gold wove into a circle, until there was a circlet in Sir’s hands. 

“A crown for a Little Princeling,” Sir said. His voice was still soft, his hands softer still as he placed the circlet on Adam’s head, where it nestled amongst his dusty hair. 

Adam scowled. “Please, don't start calling me that as well.”

“I have always called you that,” Sir said, with a teasing sort of lilt that didn’t sound right in his voice. “Only in my mind, rather than out loud.”

“Does it mean something?” Adam asked, reaching up to touch the crown gently, with curious fingers. 

“You know what it means,” Sir said, “in your heart of hearts.”

Adam did. He had been a seed, stolen from the Halls of Fait, where Sir lived and had always lived, if the rumours were to be believed. The people called him Little Princeling, and they called Sir Highness. 

“The flower I came from,” Adam said quietly. “It was in your Halls.”

“It was the same flower your mother came from,” Sir said, with infinite sadness. His face creased and crumbled like ash, and his mouth sank low and Adam touched a hand to his chin to lift it, to bring it back up. “My wife looked just like you do. The same fine bones, the same earthen hair, the same eyes. My flower was beside hers, and we met young, and grew together, and we waited for her flower to bloom again.”

Adam dropped his hand away. “Wouldn’t that make me her brother?”

Sir laughed. “Not at all. The flowers always bring children of the ones that came before. Fae are only childs.”

“Fae are strange,” Adam corrected, and Sir laughed again.

“We waited a long time for the flower to bloom again,” Sir said, and his eyes searched all over Adam’s face. “When it finally did, we were overjoyed, but it did not last long.”

“Vengeful hands,” Adam said, remembering. 

Sir’s mouth twisted into a bitter grin. “Another who loved your mother, and the woman who loved him and wanted your mother to suffer. They stole you away, so that we would remain unhappy for life.”

“What happened to her? My mother?” Adam asked. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know. 

“She went to Yggdrasil to beg for your protection while I searched for the thieves, and when she climbed it, she did not return,” Sir said, sounding exhausted. “I began to trace the elements of Yggdrasil in the Upper World, searching for her, but I do not know where she is, or if she lives. That is how I found you, how I followed the traces in the earth until I saw your face, and I knew you were mine.”

Adam still towered over Sir, who knelt on the ground. He knelt too, and they knelt together, and the world turned black outside the window. 

“We will find her,” Adam said. “I will help you look.”

It was not the wish of a child, or the naïve promise of a teenager. It wasn’t even the strict vow of the fae. 

It was the quiet, wilful determination of Adam Parrish. 

*

When Ronan Lynch was seven years old, he saw a boy disappear through the ground. When Ronan Lynch was seventeen, that same boy walked out of a forest that Ronan had dreamed to life. 

The day had been a hot one, Ronan remembered, and he had been biking after Declan when he paused to catch his breath, scowling at his brother’s receding figure. The bikes were new and glossy, polished lovingly, and there was no grit in the chains that he could blame his slowness on, so he blamed it on his lungs instead. 

All it had taken was a glance to the side to spot the boy. 

He had seen the boy before, but only in passing, often lingering alone by the entrance to an old trailer park, where Ronan was now. The boy always looked unimaginably sad, and he was always alone, and part of Ronan wanted to go to him when he spotted the longing looks he cast at the Barns where he lived. 

He watched the boy, and there was no longing in his gaze, only fear and determination and something else. And then, quite suddenly, there was nobody to watch. One moment the boy was there, leaning against a railing with a wild look on his face, talking to thin air, and the next he was gone, sucked down into the earth. 

Nobody believed him, but Ronan’s word was weighty enough when thrown around in the proper ways - shouted, as loud as possible, until Niall Lynch put on his coat and went to have a look - and when the right adults finally checked, Adam Parrish was gone. 

Lots of things followed that Ronan didn’t understand, but he always remembered the look on the boys’ face before he disappeared. 

When Ronan Lynch was seventeen, he dreamed a forest to life and named it Cabeswater. When he was seventeen, a boy that he had seen disappear walked out of that forest as though he had always been there.

The others hadn’t seen him yet. They had been examining the mystical place just on the outskirts of it, where the car was parked. Ronan leaned against the scorching hot hood and gazed at his creation with lazy indifference. He had built it, surely, in the depths of his mind, but nobody knew that. They thought it was another of Gansey’s discoveries, and Ronan wasn’t about to tell them they were wrong, not if it squashed the beam on Gansey’s face, not if it revealed too much about himself. 

Noah was there, his hands in his pockets, and Blue was there too, her hair shining in the sun. Gansey was talking, his wild gestures of excitement captivating his audience. 

In another world, this wouldn’t have been enough for the group of them to feel whole, and perhaps it wasn’t in this one, either, because the space Ronan was staring at suddenly became inhabited by something. Someone. Something? 

A golden shape emerged. Long, narrow legs and arms, thin and small but strong, too. That was all Ronan could make out from here, although something glinted on the person’s head. They stood in the field of buttercups and stared around, seemingly stunned, and none of that made any sense, because this was Ronan’s forest. 

“Oh,” Noah said, but his eyes weren’t on the figure. They were on Ronan. He averted them as soon as Ronan glanced at him sharply, but Ronan wasn’t fooled by his placid expression. Noah knew things, that much was certain, things that he shouldn’t have, and Ronan could never work out how he knew them. 

“Something wrong, Czerny?” Gansey adjusted the cuff of his sleeve importantly and peered at them all in turn. He was incandescent in his excitement, Helios brought low. 

“There’s someone in the forest,” Blue said suddenly, her eyes narrowed in the direction of the figure, which was moving swiftly towards them. Almost too fast, stirring up buttercups in his wake. 

Ronan felt something like dread in his stomach, which was odd, because Ronan had made it a personal goal not to feel anything remotely resembling fear unless he was asleep. He pinched himself, even though he knew it didn’t matter; you could still feel pain when you were asleep. 

“He’s not in the forest, he’s in the field, but he sure as fuck came out of it,” Ronan said. 

All four of them straightened. They had only just met Cabeswater, but Ronan knew that each and every one of them felt protective over it, as though it was theirs. He didn’t want some stranger roaming around inside it. 

“We’ll just have to ask him how he found it,” Gansey said, but he trailed off as the stranger came into view. There was something very otherworldly about him, enough that Gansey stopped speaking. Blue made a small noise in the back of her throat as her eyes skated over gold, bare arms, stunned. Noah hummed. Ronan did nothing. 

It was barely human, but Ronan knew that face. That face had stuck in the back of his mind for years, and this face was different, older, more golden, but still the same. 

Adam Parrish wore red cloth now, and a circlet of gold on his head. His hair was thick and the colour of dirt, and his skin shone like honey, smattered with freckles. Thistles gripped his trousers and petals protruded from his feet, which were bare and smothering soft grass beneath them. 

He examined them all intently before his eyes landed on Ronan. 

“What did you do?” Adam asked. His tone was sharp, but his voice was pleasant, not quite summer, but the depths of spring. It reminded Ronan of the Barns, and he felt his shoulders relax. 

“I didn’t do anything,” Ronan said, bristling slightly. “Who the fuck are you?”

Noah made a sound, almost like a hollow laugh. “You already know.”

“My name,” said Adam, “is Adam Parrish, and you stole my forest with your dreams.”

As one, Ronan’s friends turned to look at him. Ronan ignored them. He kept his eyes firmly on Adam, whose spine turned to steel under Ronan’s gaze. One thing was for sure, Ronan thought, as he registered Blue’s indignant noises and Noah’s accusing silence and Gansey’s soft, betrayed tone; he did not fucking like Adam Parrish one fucking bit.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! Please leave a comment/kudos if you did and let me know what you thought, I'd love to hear from you <3 And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr.


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